Dickinson's Queer Lyric

Refusing what Culler calls “normalizing novelizing”, Chapter 3 delineates how Dickinson’s queer lyric is constructed as resistance to normativity – both sexual and textual. Following Berlant and Warner’s definition of heteronormativity as residing in all areas of life and experience, I read Dickinson’s non-authoritative practice of the “open text”, her resistance to normative editorial practices, as the expression of a queer resistance to heteronormativity. I investigate the role that Shakespeare plays in Dickinson’s queer apprenticeship and in her practice of what Halberstam has called the “queer art of failure”.